So here we are, arguably the most most important and strategic element of building your automated blog empire – identifying your targeted keywords. Why is this so important? Well there are any number of reasons, some of which we will address in this article. But the key thing to remember is that these are the keywords that your automated tool will build content around. Whether it’s five words, or fifty words, they represent the content that the automated blog tools will generate.

There are several elements to consider when selecting your targeted keywords:

• how relevant are they to the niche you want to target
• how competitive are they and how hard it will be to get page one ranking
• how much content is available from article and RSS sources that you can pull from
• what are the monetization options for your blog

To me, finding keyword phrases to target for my niche websites is probably the most fun part of the business. I guess the reason I like it so much is I love figuring out how other people use the search engines when they do searches. I am on a continual quest to learn how to “beat” the search engines by finding the keyword phrases that yield good traffic but are not very competitive. Understanding how the search engines work and how people interact with them will certainly improve your chances to succeed in search engine marketing.

It’s time for a disclaimer. I am writing this automated blog primer with the assumption that everyone who moves forward will be using Market Samurai as your keyword generation tool. If you do not have this product, I highly recommend that you at least try out the 12-day Market Samurai free trial so you can see firsthand why it is loved by so many people. It is well worth the $97 that you will pay for the full product.

But back to the automated blog and how you should approach your keyword research. Market Samurai keyword research allows you to start with a single keyword phrase and start your search. Each search brings back around 200 items from the Google search database and you can filter out keywords that you don’t want to track, add other keywords that you want to include, and define positive / negative keywords.

So as you are considering a niche market to pursue, you might enter a general keyword phrase like “dog training”. Market Samurai will then present you a list of roughly 200 keyword phrases that closely match the “dog training” keyword and you can start the process of finding the best keyword phrases for your blog.

After you ahve finished using Market Samurai to generate the keywords through the search function, you can now run the analyze function to get detailed data about your targeted keywords. The analyze keyword function brings back detailed data about each keyword, including the following:

• organic info – includes number of total searches, projected number of clicks, trends and other info
• adwords data – includes adwords traffic, click through rate, and cost per click
• competition – provides data on how many websites have that keyword, how many have the keyword in the title tag, and cost per click competition info
• commerciality – I have never seen this type of information before, but it measures the commerciality of the keyword – the value of the adword and the value of having #1 position in Google

I normally go through the keyword list at this point and start filtering out keywords that don’t meet a minimum traffic level, or maybe to remove those that have too high a competition from other web pages. The goal at this point is to narrow the list and identify the best keyword phrases to pursue. And especially if I am trying to dive down into a niche I start to explore this initial keyword phrase as far as I go.

And this is where it gets really exciting. Market Samurai provides the ability to drill down on any keyword and start the process over again. So after it goes out to Google and returns the initial 200 keyword, you can click on one of the keywords to drill down further. So many times I will start with a single keyword and within an hour I might have identified a list of really good, competitive (meaning I can get good page ranking) keywords that I then start to target.

So what is the definition of a good keyword phrase? I apply something called the 20-15-50 rule which is a formula that I apply to make my final keyword selection. This 20-15-50 rule typically provides me with more keywords than I can use. Here is what each of those numbers mean:

• 20 – I am looking for keywords that have a minimum of 20 keyword searches a day. Now obviously, I want keywords that get a lot more than 20, but that is the low threshold that I set – nothing less than 20 searches per day makes my short list of keywords to target/.
• 15 – This is a phrase-to-broad ratio (PBR) which is a metric provided by Market Samurai that identifies how often that keyword is searched. For example, it measures how many times someone might search for “red dog training collars” vs. “dog training collars red”. The impact is that if the PBR gets much lower than 15 the keyword may be a great keyword, but given that it is not searched in that word order, it could impact the overall effectiveness of that keyword.
• 50 – This number represents how much competition there is for the keyword and the 50 represents that filter out any keyword that has more than 50,000 competing pages. Now if you know anything about search engines, this is a very, very low number for search competition. The intent is to target a keyword that does not have a lot of competition.

Now you might wonder how many keywords you can find using this method. In a recent search project, I started off with women’s shoes as my primary keyword, and about four hours later, I had almost 100 keywords that I would classify as good, if not great keywords.

So imagine if you find 50 keywords that get on average 40 searches per day that you can get high ranking for. In fact, some of these will even be easy to get #1 position, because many times you will find very good keywords that do not have any page optimized for that keyword phrase. These keywords are the golden nuggets that you can target to optimize to start driving traffic to your blog.

As your site gets more pages indexed and ranked, you can start going after more competitive keywords. So maybe you move the numbers up to 50-15-100 to represent minimum of 50 searches per day, 15% PBR and 100,000 competitive sites. This will open up a whole new list of words that you can then target.

The two key points to remember from this lesson are:

• keywords are the key, single, most important aspect of internet marketing, and especially if you are using automated blog tools
• you need a good keyword tool like Market Samurai to help you select your keywords, or you have very little chance of success

In this whole series of lessons, there are only two products that you will hear me say that need to purchase for starting automated blogs. The first is the automated blog tool that we have talked about so far, which I will provide more information on various options and offer my opinion on which tool I think is best. The second is a good keyword tool and Market Samurai is simply the best.

I’ve often said, internet marketing is not hard, but you have to work hard to be successful. You also have to work smart, and in this lesson I wanted to point out the importance of a good keyword strategy and inform you that Market Samurai is very important to your success.

Next lesson we will start discussing what it’s like under the cover of an automated blog solution and how you go about getting it set up.